Chosen Solution
I was just wondering if anyone had feedback on fusing a 128 BLADE with a 2TB SSD. I actually have a 2017 iMac, into which I just put a 2TB 950 EVO, replacing the 2TB HD that was previously there. Right now I have the 2TB SSD fused with the 128GB NVME blade, but the read/write speeds are hovering around 500… which is not quite what I was hoping for NOTE: I actually think the regular HDD 2TB fusion drive crushes this, in benchmark tests I’ve seen on YouTube… at least early in the tests, tho obviously does decelerate to normal HDD speeds over time… but on the BLADE+SSD fusion set up, the max and consistent speed seems to be the SSD speed. I’m curious why an NVME+SSD fusion drive would be SLOWER than the HDD fusion setup. Any thoughts? Reading your exchange above, I’m thinking perhaps better now to use the 128GB for booting, and the SSD for the home directory. But I remain curious as to why the NVME isn’t kicking in at least a bit, in my benchmark tests.
It makes no sense to create a Fusion Drive set with two SSD’s. The concept of a Fusion drive was to use a smaller SSD with a slower HDD to get a cheaper storage solution than getting a larger more expensive SSD. At the time it made sense as larger SSD where still very expensive. The problem here is you would be wasting the blade SSD’s benefit as the I/O difference between the SSD’s is so little. Configuring the drives as discrete drive makes more sense! then you can use the Blade SSD as your boot drive & OS, leave your Apps on the SATA SSD with your data. If you really want speed! The better solution would be to create a external RAID drive set using SSD’s. That way you are able to use more of the I/O channel in this case Thunderbolt 3. Here’s the skinny on the I/O connections: SATA III - 6.0 Gb/sBlade PCIe x4 slot - 7.5 Gb/s (8 GT/s)Thunderbolt 3 - 40 Gb/s These are what the channel can offer the device it’s not what the device connected can in fact do! As you’ve discovered the difference between the SATA & PCIe SSD is not that much! Thats because the SSD’s are not as fast as the channel connection they are using.
